fuck you.
let me tell you a few things about programing baseball. namely baseball at wrigley field.
and specifically baseball at wrigley field in the playoffs.
during the seventh inning we do a little something at wrigley called the seventh inning stretch. you might have heard of it.
in the old days my hero, harry caray, would put down his beer at the end of the top half of the seventh, stand up, and pick up the PA microphone and he’d say something along the lines of
Let me hear ya!
and then he would say, a-one, a-two, a-three
and no matter if the cubs were getting their asses handed to them, or if they were winning by a bunch or if it was a close game all the cub fans would stand up and sing along with that drunken old man and everything would be great again.
the song he would sing is called Take Me Out To The Ballgame.
when harry was dying, he wasnt able to make it to some of the cubs games. so some of the local celebrities like Bill Murray and Walter Payton would work their way up to the broadcast booth and sing Take Me Out To The Ballgame for harry.
after the Lord called him up to the Big Leagues they hired his grandson to broadcast the games, but even he knew that he wasnt harry, so they started a new tradition where they would let local stars like mike ditka and big names like ozzy osbourne lead the crowd in song.
sometimes the renditions are horrible, sometimes theyre wonderful. usually theyre laughable.
last night during one of the most exciting playoff games imaginable, jimmy buffett stood up in the middle of the seventh inning to sing to the friendly confines.
fox, thumbing their nose to history, raising their middle finger to sentiment, and putting their head into the sand of sense of place, cut to commercial and robbed the millions of baseball fans of those thirty seconds of charm that you can only get at wrigley field, and chose to sell soap. or beer. or whatever the fuck they chose to sell like the dirty whores that they are.
yes im emotional about this sort of thing, but not ridiculously so. i understand business, and theres money to be made in televised sports in postseason, but that 30 seconds can be made up. youre already pimping out the green screen behind the plate so my perfect baseball scene is bastardized with a budweiser ad when all im trying to do is watch the batter and the pitcher.
why must you also take away my seventh inning stretch?
fuck you fox sports.
and another thing, whats this shit with not telling us which game is going to be on Fox tonight and which game is going to be on FX?
i live in Hollywood. Los Angeles. New York and Boston will get the game on Fox in their towns, and Chicago and Miami will get the game on Fox in their towns.
Just fucking tell us which game we’re going to get in LA on Fox so we know which channel to tivo. is that so hard? you people love those damn scrolls at the bottom of the screen. scroll that shit for us. are you all on crack?
Have Tim McCarver announce, “game two of this series will be seen in the following cities…” and it will be shown on FX in the rest of the country.
simple.
simple for me because i care about the baseball viewer. simple for me because my entire fucking life isnt devoted to selling out the national pastime so i can get a better toupee and eat more beef.
cut to commerical tonight and feel the wrath of harry when your soul gets sent to hell cuz thats my mans moment and you cant broadcast a cubs game in chicago without paying your respect to the man, and the man is all about the stretch, so quit being fucking little bitches about it.
you are sooooo lucky to have the cubs in the playoffs right now, and if they play the redsox in the world series it will be a cash cow like youve never seen before. so knock off the greed move.
for once in your sorry lives.
mark prior will shut florida out tonight. check your local listings since fox has its head up its ass.
tina + adrants + bitchen + kate sullivan